First High Performance Cloud Benchmarks Unveiled

First High Performance Cloud Benchmarks Unveiled
Study highlights need for transparency in the cloud
Business Wire
DALLAS -- May 14, 2013
Until now, there have been very little verifiable, objective cloud performance
benchmarks. FireHost, the secure cloud hosting company, has again bridged an
important gap for enterprises that require a cloud they can trust before
they’ll even consider moving production workloads to the cloud. To give IT
stakeholders some genuine, meaningful and independently verified data about
cloud performance,FireHost and six other leading cloud hosting providers were
benchmarked by an independent, third-party research firm in a series of
extensive tests to provide a head-to-head comparison. FireHost created several
impactful infographics that depict the market and business drivers for high
performance cloud in healthcare, payments and more general IT environments.
“As enterprises migrate to the cloud it is critical that they consider the
right metrics that will have positive returns on investment without impairing
performance in speed, flexibility, reliability, control, efficiency and
costs,” said Chris Wiles, CTO of Zeta Compliance Technologies. “This kind of
performance comes down to designing an infrastructure that is top spec in
absolutely every department, which is why we chose FireHost as out hosting
partner."
Three factors were individually tested to measure server performance –
processor, memory and storage – and each were evaluated working jointly during
workloads for an overall server performance grade. A bare-metal dedicated
server was used as a benchmark control. FireHost scored highest in all areas
including overall server performance, outperforming Amazon Web Services EC2,
Dell vCloud, HP Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud Express and Terremark
vCloud. Only three out of the seven cloud providers scored higher than the
dedicated server in average overall server performance*.
“Performance is the game-changing metric that no one talks about because it’s
difficult and expensive to measure,” said Todd Gleason, Director of Technology
for FireHost. “Many cloud infrastructures were built with a single focus on
price point, but FireHost serves enterprises with critical services that have
more sophisticated considerations and realize that a number of factors beyond
the invoice from your cloud hosting provider impact the total cost to own a
IaaS solution.”
The performance benchmark study offers IT stakeholders a great deal of much
needed transparency before committing to a fully managed IaaS provider. The
report demonstrates that not all clouds are created equal and provides a
baseline to help improve predictions on how critical, production applications
will perform once in a cloud infrastructure. For example, the processor,
memory and storage of a high performance cloud infrastructure can produce
double the efficiency with fewer resources than commodity clouds. The total
cost of ownership can be considerably lower with a high performance cloud,
than with a lower performing, commodity cloud option as well.
“FireHost has always carved a unique path in the secure cloud category,
focusing first on enterprise-grade security and backing it up with a high
performance cloud, demanded by enterprises for production workloads,” said
Chris Drake, founder and CEO of FireHost.
Additional information on FireHost’s secure, high-performance cloud services
and a copy of the benchmarking study can be obtained from FireHost.
*For overall server performance testing, the benchmark observed how the server
groups fared using real-life workloads, measuring the holistic performance of
coordinated operations between memory, processor and storage. The control
server specifications included a Dell PowerEdge server configured with 16GB
DDR3 1066Mhz memory, dual quad core Intel Xeon E5506 2.13GHz processors and
2.5” Seagate SAS 15K RPM drives.
About FireHost
FireHost offers the most secure cloud hosting available, protecting sensitive
data and brand reputations of some of the largest companies in the world. With
infrastructure built for security, compliance, performance and scalability,
responsible businesses choose FireHost to reduce risk and improve the
collection, storage and transmission of their most confidential data. Secure
cloud servers, available inDallas, Phoenix, London and Amsterdam, offer
robust,geographically redundant business continuity options across all sites.
Based in Dallas andfunded by The Stephens Group,FireHost is the chosen
secure cloud service provider for brands that won't compromise on the security
of theirpayment card and healthcare data.http://www.firehost.com.
Follow FireHost on:
http://www.twitter.com/firehost
http://www.linkedin.com/company/firehost-inc.
http://www.facebook.com/FireHost
Contact:
FireHost
Cathi Lane, +1-877-262-3473 x. 8133
cathi.lane@firehost.com
or
Editorial Contact:
Ubiquity Public Relations
Sarah Hawley, 480-292-4640
sarah@ubiquitypr.com